A little bit more for the workers

Donald Trump promised to replace NAFTA with a new trade treaty. After a year of renegotiations, NAFTA 2.0 is no replacement of the old deal, containing worrying retreats and a few social advances. But regardless of what the new incoming US Congress does with the pact, the text strikes a first blow at the old international trade order.

Get it right: auto parts production line at the Bosch factory in San Luis Potosi, Mexico

Pedro Pardo · AFP · Getty

Regardless of how strongly progressives may wish that a Donald Trump presidency were not the context for the first serious rewrite of the US trade agreement model, there is no avoiding that a battle royal will ensue in 2019 over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

After 13 months of renegotiations, a revised NAFTA text was published, on 30 September, that includes improvements for which progressives have long campaigned, damaging terms we have long opposed and important unfinished business. The next phase in the battle to replace NAFTA and stop its ongoing harm has begun, with a long and twisting path ahead, before a final package will go to the US Congress for consideration in 2019.

How progressives engage in that debate will have tremendous policy and political consequences.

That the administrations of Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau and Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto did not deliver a transformational replacement of the corporate-rigged trade pact model that NAFTA hatched in the early 1990s is no surprise. But if progressives fight to secure swift and certain enforcement of the pact’s new labour standards – and achieve some other key improvements – the final package could stop some of NAFTA’s continuing, serious damage to people across North America. And that would be a big deal.

The outcome of the NAFTA renegotiations will have implication far beyond North America. NAFTA originated the cynical conceit of using ‘trade’ negotiations to lock in through diplomacy new powers and rights for investors, monopoly protections for selected industries, and rollbacks of consumer and environmental safeguards to be sold under the brand ‘free trade agreement’. The NAFTA model is being replicated worldwide under names like Economic Partnership Agreement and Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement, imposing an array of neoliberal policies unrelated to trade that enhance corporate power and undermine the principle and practice of democratic (...)